Saying Goodbye to 500 of My Favorite Channels

This week, we at the Cynical Christian household are cancelling our satellite TV service. We're looking for ways to cut expenses, and since we're already down to eating just two meals a day and we've traded our car for an old donkey (I've named him "Infiniti Q35"), the dish package was one of the few things left to cut.

So now I'm going back to getting TV through the air for the first time in twenty years, when I left my rural Alabama hometown for college and discovered sweet, sweet cable. Oh, how the world opened up! MTV! Movies that I hadn't cared enough to try to see in the theater! Good Times reruns in the afternoon! Atlanta Braves baseball! Those were heady days indeed.

The biggest question to me is, how will I cope with the sudden reduction in entertainment options? Will I slowly go insane? Or will I go insane all at once? Will I bleeg a bloop bloop klepper manda whoooooeeeeeee!!?!? Hahahahahahahahaha!! No, seriously, so far I'm ok.

It's amazing that, in the twenty short years of my adult life, I've gone from having three (count 'em, 3) channels on TV (and I'm not counting PBS, because why would you?) to thinking that it is a colossal sacrifice to give up access to channels that are devoted exclusively to sports, food, and cartoons. How quickly I took an embarrassment of riches and turned it into a necessity.

Thanks to a digital TV antenna (that one to the left there), we still have 28 channels. Twenty-eight! Which is about 22 more than we will ever watch.

In the run-up to the end of our service, I wondered how I'd feel when it was gone. I was afraid I would miss things on channels that I rarely watched and didn't need in the first place.

But the television gods seemed to be working hard to validate our decision in those days by broadcasting an unusually high number of things that made me say, "I don't know if I feel comfortable allowing that into my house." The last straw was probably that very uncomfortable shirtless back rub episode of Property Brothers.

In the end, we wound up feeling a lot of peace about the decision to drop the dish. And after the first couple of days of broadcast TV, I've done a lot of catching up on local news, and I am still non-crazy, as far as I can tell.

Keep watching this space as I describe either all the new books I'm reading and my renewed relationship with my family, or my rapid descent into madness. Maybe both! Wheeeee!